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  Catfish Lullaby

  “In her excellent novella, AC Wise revisits a Louisiana family at key moments during the later decades of the recent past—moments connected to what seems to be a local legend, one concerning the conflict between a pair of fantastical figures. Not only do her protagonists discover that what they took for fantasy is fact, they learn that it is more complicated than they could have expected. The result is a compelling narrative that begs to be read in one sitting.” (John Langan, author of Sefira and Other Betrayals)

  “Over the last few years, AC Wise has been consistently creating some of the very best speculative short fiction out there, and now with her glorious novella Catfish Lullaby, she takes her craft to a whole new level. With a potent atmosphere, a formidable antagonist, and well-drawn, unforgettable characters, this book has definitely got it all. An absolute must-read for 2019.” (Gwendolyn Kiste, author of The Rust Maidens and Pretty Marys All in a Row)

  “Catfish Lullaby seamlessly combines Southern folklore with cosmic horror. There’s an elegiac undertone to this lullaby that’s as deep and mysterious as the bayou where it takes place.” (Craig Laurance Gidney, author of A Spectral Hue)

  “Folk tales give birth to new mythologies in AC Wise’s delightfully enthralling Southern Gothic novella Catfish Lullaby. Flooded with dark sorcery and white-knuckle suspense, Catfish Lullaby demonstrates the many ways saviors and devils can occupy the same body, whether it arises from the depths of the swamp or the dark of the grave.” (Mike Allen, World Fantasy Award–nominated author of Unseaming and Aftermath of an Industrial Accident)

  Catfish Lullaby

  by AC Wise

  Published by

  Broken Eye Books

  www.brokeneyebooks.com

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 2019 Broken Eye Books and the author.

  Cover illustration by Sishir Bommakanti

  Cover design by Scott Gable

  Interior design by Scott Gable

  Editing by Scott Gable and C. Dombrowski

  978-1-940372-29-7 (trade paperback)

  978-1-940372-44-0 (ebook)

  All characters and events in this book are fictional.

  Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  part one

  There are stories about him along the Mississippi River from Cottonwood Point all the way down to New Orleans, maybe further still. Every place’s got their own name for him—Wicked Silver, Old Tom, Fishhook—but where my people come from, smack dab in the middle of nowhere Louisiana, it was always Catfish John. Depending who you talk to, he’s either a hero or a devil, one so wicked even hell won’t take him.

  —Myths, History, and Legends from the Delta to the Bayou (Whippoorwill Press, 2016)

  ***

  C

  aleb lay facing the window, his grandmother’s quilt pulled to his chin. From his position, he could just see the persimmon tree in the yard and, beyond it, the screen of pines separating his grandparents’ property from Archie Royce’s land. Back in the woods, past Royce’s and where the ground started to go soft, Caleb’s daddy—Lewis’s sheriff—was leading a team to drag the swamp for a missing girl.

  Caleb had heard Denny Harmon and Robert Lord talking about it at school. They were in first grade, but they’d probably both get held back, so Caleb would be stuck in the same class as them next year. Denny had said Catfish John took the girl.

  “My cousin’s friend was there. Catfish John came out of the swamp like a gator, mouth full of teeth. He grabbed her with his webbed hands and pulled her into the water.”

  Denny Harmon had grinned, looking like a gator himself, and looked right at Caleb.

  “He probably killed her with a death roll and strung her up by her feet from the trees and slit her throat. He probably let her blood drain into the swamp to feed his catfish family.”

  Caleb hadn’t run to tattle, but Robert held him while Denny punched him in the gut anyway, leaving him wheezing for breath.

  “Catfish John likes sissy black boys best,” Robert said, leaning close. “He’ll leave us alone because we made it easier to catch you.”

  Mark, Caleb’s best friend, found him after Denny and Robert left. Caleb’s stomach hurt the rest of the day, but he still didn’t tell. If Robert and Denny found out—and they would—it would only make things worse.

  His stomach didn’t hurt anymore, but he couldn’t get Denny’s words out of his head. His daddy was out in those woods. What if Catfish John got him? Even a sheriff with a gun could get eaten by a monster.

  “I’m telling you who’s responsible. Every damn fool in Lewis knows it ’cept nobody else is willing to do a thing about it.” His grandfather’s voice drifted under the bedroom door, interrupted by a nasty fit of coughing.

  “Emmett, hush. Don’t bring all that up again. ’Sides, you’ll wake Caleb.”

  “Bet you he’s awake anyhow.” His grandfather chuckled, the rattling sound of his cough lingering.

  Caleb started guiltily as his door opened, light from the hall spilling around his grandmother. It was too late to pretend he hadn’t been listening.

  “Can’t sleep, sweet pea?” His grandmother didn’t sound upset.

  He sat up, nodding, and she sat on the edge of his bed. Caleb was surprised when his grandfather followed her into the room, crossing to the window to look out toward the trees.

  “Did Catfish John kill somebody?” Caleb glanced between his grandparents.

  His grandmother’s mouth made a little o, and the skin around his grandfather’s eyes crinkled like it did when he was mad—usually at the government buying up timber from people’s land without paying a fair price.

  “Damn ghost stories.” He rested a hand on the window sill. Faint light showed a white scar across the back of his left hand, running from the knuckle of his first finger down to his wrist below his pinky. “That’s what keeps folks from going after him. They think old Archie’ll put a curse on ’em. Just like his daddy.”

  He sounded like he wanted to spit. Caleb sat up straighter. Did his grandfather think Archie Royce had something to do with the missing girl? There were stories about him too, though not as many as about Catfish John. Gators as big as trucks were supposed to guard Archie’s property, and on top of that, the land was haunted on account of some people Archie’s granddaddy killed a long time ago.

  “What makes you ask about Catfish John?” His grandmother put her hand over Caleb’s, her papery white skin a contrast to his warm brown.

  Her look flickered past him to his grandfather. She smiled, but the expression went thin at the edges.

  “I heard . . .” Caleb hesitated. If he told his grandmother about Robert and Denny, it might get back to them. His grandmother and Robert’s nana both got their hair done at Miss Linda’s place after all.

  “Just something I heard at school.” Caleb shrugged, looking down.

  “Well, I know a story about Catfish John too.” His grandmother leaned forward like she was about to tell a secret, and Caleb looked up again.

  “Don’t go filling his head with more nonsense, Dorrie.” His grandfather spoke without tu
rning from the window. He sounded more tired than upset.

  “I want to hear,” Caleb said.

  “Well.” His grandmother glanced at his grandfather, daring him to interrupt. When he didn’t, she continued. “When I was little, my mama told me about a man who lived all alone in the swamp.”

  “Why?” Caleb caught himself too late, but his grandmother didn’t fuss at him for interrupting like she normally would.

  She smoothed the quilt. That must be why she was letting him stay up late; she was worried too.

  “No one knows. There are a lot of stories about Catfish John. Some folks say he was chased out of his home by people who thought he was a bad man. They wanted to hurt him, and he ran into the swamp to hide. Now when my mama’s best friend was a little girl, she got lost in the woods and wandered all the way to the swamp. She nearly drowned, but whatever reason he had for being there, Catfish John saved her life.”

  “But if he saved your mama’s friend, then he’d be . . .” Caleb couldn’t even begin to guess at his grandmother’s mama’s age. “He’d be a hundred years old, wouldn’t he?” He looked at his grandmother to see if she was fooling him or if she’d smack his bottom for being rude.

  “Maybe.” She smiled, surprising him, and Caleb didn’t see any sign of a trick. By the window, his grandfather made a noise in his throat.

  His grandmother kissed Caleb’s forehead.

  “Try to get some sleep, sweet pea. In the morning, I’ll fix us all a big plate of ’nanner pancakes.” She moved toward the door. “Come away from the window, Emmett. Your staring won’t do any good.”

  His grandfather made another noise but followed his grandmother, closing the door behind him. Caleb tried to picture Catfish John saving a little girl. Maybe he’d help Caleb’s daddy find the girl who was missing now. It was much a much nicer idea than the story Denny had told.

  Caleb came awake to voices drifting from the hall, though he didn’t remember falling asleep. Over the trees, the sky was a pearly grey. Not even dawn.

  “No, but we found something else.” Caleb focused in on his father’s voice; he didn’t sound happy.

  “Might be Evaneen Milton, that girl down from Baton Rouge who disappeared six, seven years ago.” His father’s voice was rough with exhaustion. “There was barely anything left of her, but she had one of them medic alert bracelets.”

  “Oh, Charlie.” His grandmother made a tutting noise. “Come on. I’ll fix us some coffee.” Their footsteps retreated down the hall.

  Caleb sat up, fully awake now. They hadn’t found the missing girl, but they’d found someone else, someone who’d gone missing before Caleb was even born. If that many people went missing in the swamp, maybe Denny was right after all. Maybe Catfish John did kill people, no matter what his grandmother said.

  As he turned the thought over, a terrible sound split the air, echoing over the trees and making Caleb’s skin pucker with goosebumps.

  It was a snarling, wet sound. A scream that wasn’t animal nor human but both. Like the swamp itself had found a voice, and it was angry that something that belonged to it had been taken away.

  part two

  chapter one

  . . . nine feet tall, webbed hands, grey skin, mouth turned down at the corners, just like a catfish.

  —Myths, History, and Legends from the Delta to the Bayou (Whippoorwill Press, 2016)

  ***

  L

  ate afternoon light hit the persimmon tree, so the fruit

  glowed, but all around, the grass was stained with a pattern like roots spread across the yard, a permanent, too-long shadow. Thin tendrils of black wrapped the tree’s branches, and the leaves curled at the edges as though burned. Caleb plucked a fruit and pressed his thumb to the skin, black rot oozing from within. Dropping the fruit, he wiped his hand on his jeans.

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Caleb’s father wiped an arm across his forehead, revealing half-moon circles of sweat staining his shirt. Early summer and already his skin bronzed brown-red from hours spent in the yard and on the porch under the eye of the sun.

  “Whole thing’s going to have to come out. Best burn the stump too, so it doesn’t spread.”

  Caleb toed a blackened patch, half expecting it to smudge like ash, but it stayed put. The stain reminded him of something he couldn’t place. Caleb half-listened to his father, thinking how his grandmother would have hated to see the tree go. Her persimmon jelly took the blue ribbon nearly every year at the Lewis County Fair.

  “I’ll go look for the chainsaw,” his father said. “Once I get the tree down, I’ll need your help hauling it.”

  Caleb nodded, and all at once, the nagging familiarity clicked into place. The rootlike pattern reminded him of the chest x-ray he’d glimpsed clipped to the chart at the foot of his grandmother’s hospital bed, just before the end. She hadn’t smoked a day in her life, but her lungs had been threaded with dark shadows. She’d outlived his grandfather but barely, and neither of them had been that old.

  As his father disappeared around the side of the house, Caleb followed the shadows twisting away from the tree. They vanished in the pines bordering the property, headed toward Archie Royce’s land. A flicker of movement between the trees made him start guiltily as though Archie Royce had caught him staring and now glared back.

  Turning his back deliberately on the trees, Caleb pulled on work gloves and began gathering fallen persimmons. He chucked them into the garbage can they’d dragged into the yard, each exploding with a wet splat that was equal parts satisfying and unnerving. The back of his neck itched, and he fought the urge to turn around and see if he was actually being watched or if it was only his imagination. Even if it wasn’t Archie Royce, that didn’t mean nothing watched him.

  Caleb shrugged, rolling his shoulders against the sensation. It struck him that he wasn’t even sure what Archie Royce looked like. Lewis wasn’t a big town, but even after all the years of his grandparents, and now him and his father, living just on the other side of the trees, Caleb had never seen their neighbor face to face.

  There were plenty of rumors of course. One of his father’s fishing buddies liked to tell a story about being chased off the Royce land with a shotgun when he was a kid. It could have been Archie Royce or his father, but whoever it was had fired into the air. From what he’d heard, with his skin, there was every chance Archie Royce would keep the gun level when he fired if Caleb ever strayed onto his land.

  Archie wasn’t the only mystery beyond the trees. Some folks said he had over a dozen kids—all by different women, not all of them willing—holed up on that property. Like his own private cult. Caleb had never seen evidence of them either. The only Royce he’d ever run into was Archie’s son, Del. Even though Del looked old enough to be in college or be working at least, all he ever seemed to do was mooch around the Hilltop store, buying liquor and cigarettes. He’d broken in after hours once, but somehow, the charges hadn’t stuck, and he’d been back on the streets of Lewis by the next day.

  Caleb’s main impression of Del was dark hair and a slouching walk. The closest Caleb had ever seen him was last summer when Caleb and Mark had gone to set pennies on the tracks for trains to flatten. Del had been crouched on the old track, running parallel to the new one, half its ties pulled up all the spaces between growing with weeds. At first, Caleb had thought Del was trying to light a fire, but then he’d heard the unmistakable scream of an animal in pain. Caleb had gotten just close enough to see what looked like a possum or a raccoon. Del had it staked to the tracks, his hands bloody like he was flaying it alive.

  By the time Caleb and Mark had found someone to tell, it was too late. Del was gone, and he’d cleaned up all the evidence behind him.

  “Hey. You hear me?” His father’s voice jarred Caleb back to the present.

  “Sir?” Caleb realized he was standing with a handful of rotten persimmon
s, staring into the trees despite himself.

  “I said, why don’t you start in on the branches with these clippers. I’m going to have to run into Buck’s for a new chain. This one’s rusted through.”

  “Yessir.” Caleb accepted the clippers his father held out.

  After a moment, the truck’s engine roared to life. Caleb squeezed the handles of the clippers together, and the branch between the blades gave with a dry snap like breaking bone.

  Sweat gathered as he worked, his muscles aching pleasantly. Even so, he couldn’t help pausing every now and then to glance at the trees. His grandfather talked about Archie’s father, Clayton, sometimes, but more often than not, Caleb’s grandmother would shush him. Still, it was pretty clear his grandfather hadn’t liked the man.

  There was a plaque at town hall dedicated to a Reverend Elphias Royce. The family had been in Lewis for generations; they’d practically founded the town, but for all that, no one really seemed to like them as far as Caleb knew. Over the years, the family had grown increasingly reclusive, and the rumors about them nastier. But that’s all it was, rumors. Nothing legal stuck, just like Del breaking into Hilltop. It was like the family and even the land had some supernatural force around it.

  Caleb gathered the cut branches and dumped the armload in the trash on top of the burst fruit. The black goo in the bottom of the can smelled foul, and Caleb regretted busting them. Burning the tree stump didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all. He pictured the flames following the black lines of rot all the way back to Archie Royce’s house. Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing either.

  Caleb woke to ruddy light blazing above the tree line, bright as dawn but the wrong color. His first sleep-muzzed thought was that his father had decided to burn the stump after all. But that would be a controlled burn and not in the middle of the night. He rocketed up, rushing down the hall to bang on his father’s door.